Why Companies Like Orange Silicon Valley Are Working With Private Blockchain Startups

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Blockchain is the new buzzword for 2016. The largest, most secure public blockchain is the one used by Bitcoin, which has a current market value of about $6.4 billion. For many entrepreneurs out there, the alluring nature of the blockchain’s potential might be a new calling. Bitcoin enables many interesting innovations, such as making international wage payments faster and cheaper through my company, Bitwage, but there are equally intriguing things happening with what are known as private or permissioned blockchains.

A blockchain, at its most basic level, is just a means of storing digital information in an immutable form. At the corporate IT strategy level, blockchain based systems are conceptually similar to relational databases, which disrupted the mainframe’s dominance a generation ago, or NoSQL databases, which began disrupting the relational database’s niche at the start of this decade.